Tuesday, February 12, 2013

An article in the The Economist describes a company that has pioneered a way to use genetic testing to pinpoint the source of timber. Their hope is to try and slow illegal logging.

Seeing the wood for the trees
Genetic testing of wood can curb illegal logging

SUPPOSE you want to buy a table. But you care about orang-utans, indigenous peoples and carbon emissions, so you don’t want it made with illegally harvested logs. Or suppose you run a chain of furniture shops, and you don’t want to go to jail for buying illegal timber. Either way, you face a snag: how to tell if a log is legal?

Enter DoubleHelix Tracking Technologies, a Singapore-based firm that uses DNA testing to pinpoint where a piece of wood is from. “You can’t forge DNA,” says Andrew Lowe, its chief scientist. The firm sells its services to big retailers such as Lowe’s, B&Q and Marks & Spencer.

John Simon, the boss of Simmonds Lumber, another DoubleHelix client, explains how it works. His firm, an Australian timber importer, used to rely on masses of paperwork when buying merbau, a pricey hardwood from Indonesia. Given the ease with which proof-of-origin papers can be faked, it was hard to tell where any of it really came from. Now, thanks to DoubleHelix, Simmonds can show that a piece of merbau decking assembled in Australia comes from a specific (and legit) stump in Indonesia.

“We do it for both moral and business reasons,” says Mr Simon. Customers like to know that their decking is not destroying the planet. And company bosses want to stay out of trouble. Conservation laws are growing fiercer, especially in America, where businessfolk who break them may be jailed even if they did not know their wood was illegally sourced.

DNA tests face two problems. One is the cost: testing $45,000-worth of merbau will set you back $250, says Jonathan Geach, the executive director of DoubleHelix. The second is that accurate global DNA maps exist only for about 20 species of tree, and the tests are no use unless you know what you are looking for.

Neither problem seems insuperable, however. More species can be mapped, and the cost of testing will fall, as surely as a chainsawed tree. That’s bad news for the $30 billion-a-year illegal logging industry, but good for forests.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article, we mis-spelled Jonathan Geach's name. He is the executive director of DoubleHelix, not the CEO. We also said that it costs $450 to test $45,000-worth of merbau wood. The correct figure is $250. And we suggested that genetic mapping is required for all timber DNA testing services. In fact it is necessary only for some. Sorry.